Education Archives – Hyperledger Foundation

Nov 02

A Hands-on Approach to Growing the Blockchain Talent Pool

By Igor Ioshpa, Norilsk Nickel Blog, Education, Hyperledger Fabric

One of the biggest barriers to growth for the blockchain industry is the availability of developers with the right skills and training. At Norilsk Nickel, we are tackling that problem directly with the Blockchain Master’s Program, which we launched in 2019 in partnership with MIPT and IBM.

Norilsk Nickel is constantly introducing and using advanced engineering technologies, and it is therefore logical that the company has focused its attention on blockchain technologies. In addition, working with students is one of the most important areas of the company’s activities. This has become the background for creation of a Blockchain Master’s Program in cooperation with the major technology players leading in their respective fields.

The Blockchain Master’s Program is based in the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, which is among the Russian technical universities regularly included in the top international rankings. MIPT is always interested in the development and implementation of educational programs in new promising areas. Educational programs at MIPT embrace numerous high-tech areas in partnership with Russian and international industrial companies.

One of the challenges in creating the Master’s Program was the fact that this was essentially the first Russian full-fledged educational program entirely dedicated to Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT). The best experts in the market, from Russia and beyond, have been involved in the development of this educational course. Since all of them are practicing experts, the curriculum is updated on an ongoing basis taking into account the latest technology developments as well as business expectations. All our lecturers work in the fields they teach for leading companies, mainly in the IT sector.

The primary task of the Master’s Program is not only to educate the students but also to enable them to gain real practical experience. Therefore, it was not easy to create a balanced curriculum. We aimed to combine both theoretical and practical disciplines to provide students with the most relevant knowledge as well as skills that will assist them in pursuing a successful business or academic career.

Our Hyperledger Fabric course, a cornerstone of the curriculum, provides the students with detailed information about the modular architecture of the Hyperledger Fabric platform and its capacities for creating blockchain applications. Given the fact that Hyperledger Fabric is the de facto standard for the enterprise blockchain platforms, the study of this subject takes two full semesters. As a result of the training, students create their own Hyperledger Fabric projects helping to solve relevant application tasks.

One of Norilsk Nickel’s key education goals is supporting talented students. That’s why all applicants who have successfully passed the entrance tests can study free of charge. The Blockchain Master’s Program provides for paid internships as well, so any student who is serious about studying can get an offer as early as after the first academic semester. Meanwhile, the student can be engaged in both business projects and scientific and research activities. Norilsk Nickel, as a major industrial player, is committed to providing all interested students with the opportunity to build their career path concurrently with the study on the basis of real projects or scientific inquiries.

Over the three years of the Master’s Program existence, we have witnessed vertical growth of the number of potential applicants, which indicates the importance of having such programs. To meet the demand, we made a decision to double the intake of students this year.

We have also revised and adjusted the curriculum to make the program as relevant as possible, based on the development of technologies and the requests formed by the business environment.

We actively participate in various events both within and outside MIPT to demonstrate our expertise in blockchain technology. Such events enable the students and the IT community to understand the relevance and importance of this technology and help us to make it more understandable for a wider audience.

To grow the Blockchain Master’s Program further, we plan to strengthen the level of scientific research to compete with top technical academic institutions around the world. We already have reached some preliminary agreements for this expanded focus.

For more information about the program, please visit website https://blockchain.mipt.ru/en.

Cover image: Pxfuel

Nov 24

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Blockchain Education: The Keys to the Door of a New Business Revolution

By Albert Kim, Victor Huang, and Meenakshi R, EMURGO Blog, Education, Hyperledger Fabric

The global market for blockchain solutions is set to grow by $18 billion by 2024. According to IDC (International Data Corporation), 2020 alone has seen $4.4 billion spent on developing and integrating tailored enterprise blockchain solutions – up nearly four times from 2017.

With such explosive demand growth for blockchain solutions, an equally increasing supply of top-tier blockchain development talent is needed to meet the needs of some of the world’s largest corporations and organizations. These global corporations are looking to invest heavily in top tech talent to solve business inefficiencies in areas such as supply chain management, insurance, and healthcare solutions, amongst others.

As blockchain technology is still a maturing and emerging industry, business stakeholders are looking to build the technological foundation necessary to position themselves at the forefront of the next technological revolution. IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and Intel are some of the global corporations pouring resources into figuring out how to effectively implement Hyperledger-based solutions into their verticals.

Hyperledger Fabric has become one of the most well-known blockchain platforms for supply chain management solutions. A prime example: the logistics management solution Walmart Canada has implemented, which has dramatically reduced costly invoice disputes across its extensive network of freight carriers. If you’re interested, you can read up on the study here.

So what does this all mean? With demand for permissioned blockchain solutions growing at such a rapid rate, more aspiring professionals need to be trained in this emerging highly specialized area of technology.

Large corporations in a variety of business sectors are looking for people who understand the wider scope of blockchain architecture and design principles to develop solutions that can improve upon existing solutions. EMURGO’s mission via its education unit EMURGO India is to help shape the upcoming talent in this expanding space.

Trained to be Industry Ready

EMURGO India offers a comprehensive training course that provides a solid base of understanding of the underlying technology and is well aligned with the curriculum of the official Hyperledger CHFD certification.

In addition, EMURGO’s training heavily focuses on hands-on learning experiences, incorporating actual practice alongside theoretical teaching, so that students are industry ready from Day 1.

With an emphasis on hands-on learning and mentoring, this course makes sure students are able to successfully develop high quality projects and also have a thorough understanding of actual business use cases for blockchain technology.

Prestigious Win

Recently, six of EMURGO India’s student mentees won first place in the Maxonrow Blockchain Hackathon for their blockchain-based solutions to track COVID-19 vaccinations built on Hyperledger Fabric.

The Maxonrow Hackathon was highly competitive with a pool of over 40+ well-designed projects submitted, and judges and audience members from the likes of PwC, Audi, and venture capital firms analyzing the different blockchain business solutions.

Other mentees and students of EMURGO India’s education course were also able to come up with potential blockchain solutions and ideas in all kinds of industries. For example, in the healthcare industry where medical records of a particular person is strictly limited from hospital to hospital, Hyperledger-powered solutions were used to provide a permissionless environment where records could be accessed by doctors from different medical departments.

Hyperledger blockchain technology was used to address a scenario where food from one source had gotten contaminated. The solution made it possible to track down the exact source of the contamination instead of having to entirely shut down all of the numerous distribution outlets where the food source could have ended up.

The Road Ahead

In this exciting and rapidly developing space, there is no better time to position oneself within the blockchain industry and gain valuable career experience. Corporations of all sizes are rapidly hiring top talent to spearhead new innovation to become more cost efficient by streamlining outdated and expensive solutions systems in use today.

In fact, on LinkedIn, blockchain is recognized as the number one in-demand skill in 2020, ahead of other areas such as artificial technology and cloud computing. If you are interested in knowing more about the Hyperledger Fabric Course from EMURGO India, feel free to reach out to us here. EMURGO is more than happy to discuss your goals and future so that we can tailor everything to your needs.

Cover image by Tumisu from Pixabay

Aug 26

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Hyperledger-Powered Education Solutions in Action

By Hyperledger Blog, Education, Hyperledger Aries, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Iroha

Just before the age of COVID began in earnest, The New York Times ran a feature on “How Technology Is Changing the Future of Higher Education.” The rise of remote learning and other pandemic-related changes and challenges have added to the need and opportunity for technology-driven advances.

The Hyperledger community is doing its part to help the higher education market adapt to an increasingly digital world. Below we look at five Hyperledger-powered solutions that are at work now in the education market. They are helping colleges and universities modernize how they tackle a number of core tasks, including issuing and verifying academic credits, automating on-campus payments and managing students’ identity and privacy.

Read on for more about these #HyperledgerEdu solutions, built using a mix of Hyperledger technologies:

Byacco, an on-campus payment system

Soramitsu has officially released Byacco, a payment system based on Hyperledger Iroha, for the University of Aizu, Japan. Byacco is a system that allows students and staff of the University of Aizu to use an application on their phones to pay for goods in the cafeteria and university store and to transfer funds within the campus. To make a transaction, all they need is to scan or to provide a QR code, depending on the operation. Byacco’s technology also has high standards for transfers: it follows the EMV® QR Code specification and has bank application level financial security protocols. The keys that are used to authorise transactions on the blockchain are stored only on the device, in a secure storage, so that no one except the owner can access the funds. Students of the university can join the development of the system, thus acquiring skills in creating financial systems based on Hyperledger technologies.

DoDream, a “Study Abroad Platform”

Dain Leaders is an education solution provider for universities in Korea. It serves more than 45 Korean universities by providing services for students’ career path development. As part of that effort, Dain Leader is introducing its “Study Abroad Platform,” called DoDream, to support the extended education ecosystem of the universities, accreditation and related agencies, and prospective employers. Based on Oracle Blockchain Platform Cloud Service (which is powered by Hyperledger Fabric), the platform is an O2O service that provides foreign students with information on studying in Korea and a matching service with Korean universities.

Oracle Digital Certificates Solution

In the face of fast-changing demographic and economic drivers and student expectations, the current processes for issuing and verifying student certificates are too inefficient and time consuming. They can also lead to fraudulent or counterfeit certifications.

The Oracle Digital Certificates Solution, built on the Oracle Blockchain Platform (based on Hyperledger Fabric), provides a complete, end-to-end solution for educational institutions to issue verifiable tamper-proof and secure credential certification that improves the student experience after graduation and improves operational efficiency. The solution enables institutions to issue digital certificates along with transcripts and provide self-sovereign capability to the students who can share them securely with third parties through an access token.

This solution has been successfully deployed in production by customers like China Distance Education Holdings Limited (CDEL) and Taibah Valley University. CDEL uses Oracle Blockchain to share educational records and professional certifications across many educational institutions to help employers and recruiters verify the educational credentials claimed by individuals.

Many other institutions like national universities, employment agencies, government organizations, professional skills academies and universities that provide student grants/scholarships are using this solution as part of ongoing or planned pilots.

PwC Smart Credentials

Data is the new gravity in the world today and organisations are gravitating to and concentrating around trust as the ultimate currency in this data driven world. This trust is crucial for people to exchange information, especially in this digital age when trust is often violated.

With that premise, PwC developed Smart Credentials, a credential issuance, sharing, reviewing and revocation platform levegering the inherent core benefits of blockchain technology such as immutability, tamper-proof nature, transparency, authenticity and security.

Built using Hyperleder Indy and Hyperledger Aries to support the verification process, Smart Credentials has two key pillars: Authentication (you are who you say you are) and Authorization (genuine claim). Both are crucial ingredients of building trust in any ecosystem.

Smart Credentials recently won a “Bronze” medal for the Best Global Blockchain Innovation 2019 at the Reimagine Innovation awards (Backed by Wharton and QS) and is a finalist in the DataIQ 2020 awards “Best data product/ service” of the year category.

Verified.Me

As higher education moves deeper into online and remote learning for traditional and non-traditional students, colleges and universities are now offering a broader array of services that extend the campus experience to the digital realm. Beyond the advent of digital programming, educational institutions are also privy to sensitive personal student, faculty and alumni data from income and payment information to disciplinary records, healthcare and insurance information.

SecureKey Technologies’ Verified.Me service is one approach that supports education’s new digital and data privacy demands. This new digital identity verification service can help verify students, alumni and faculty in a timely and secure manner, strengthening educational institutions’ ability to expand their digital offerings with confidence – while also providing much-needed cost savings. Verified.Me is built using the IBM Blockchain Platform, which is based on Linux Foundation’s open source Hyperledger Fabric.

Join the conversation about solutions and applications supporting the higher education marketing with #HyperledgerEdu this month on social channels. Also, Hyperledger has an Education Architecture Special Interest Group that is open to all.

Feb 24

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Portland state university BUSINESS blockchain certificate program

By Dr. Stanton Heister and Dr. Kristi Yuthas Blog, Education

Portland State University is in its first year of its fully online, six-course Business Blockchain Certificate. The intensive academic program targets graduate and upper division undergraduate students and is also open to non-degree seeking community members. The for-credit program is the first of its kind and, unlike other universities, the program focuses on business students rather than engineering or computer science students.

The program is supported by a board of advisors from well known organizations in the region and across the United States. PSU has formed partnerships with Hyperledger, the Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC) and the Oregon Enterprise Blockchain Venture Studio in an effort to produce world-class blockchain curriculum that meets the challenges of a quickly evolving and disrupting force in business.

Through this certificate, The School of Business is responding to the needs of the business community as rapid advances in technology create workforce skills gaps. The employment forecast for 2019-2024 shows that demand for blockchain-related skills are the most desired by companies across functions like finance, insurance, digital media and supply chain. Regionally this demand has doubled since 2010, with the top seven northwest companies looking for blockchain professionals to drive this tremendous growth.

The objective of the Business Blockchain Certificate is to provide students with the ability to make informed decisions about whether, when and how to apply distributed ledger technology to real business and social problems. The program employs a hands-on and interdisciplinary approach, reflecting the diversity of skills necessary for success in this rapidly-changing field. Graduates of the program will have practical experience writing proposals for blockchain-based business networks, solving technical problems, designing governance protocols, determining success metrics, and building active blockchain networks with smart contract capabilities.

The coursework and projects, lab assignments, and interactions with guest speakers equip students with the ability to evaluate technical, business and ethical problems; interact directly with distributed ledger technology and its developers; and respond effectively to future technological advances in data handling in their companies and industries.

PSU student teams won the national Trueup Blockchain Challenge competition in 2018 and 2019. Additionally, a team of PSU students is currently one of five finalists in the year-long Blockchain for Logistics and Supply Chain Management Innovation Challenge hosted by Arizona State and Sponsored by the US Military.

The program’s co-founders, Dr. Kristi Yuthas and Dr. Stanton Heister, recently published an article titled The blockchain and how it can influence conceptions of the self in the journal Technology in Society.